I recently setup my development system from scratch and one of the tasks is installing PostgreSQL as my apps are almost always deployed to Heroku and they <3 PG.

As you may or may not know, Lion ships with a castrated Postgres installation which (if you don’t already know this (!!!!)) can make it challenging to use something like Homebrew for your installation medium.

To avoid this whole situation I suggest you checkout Postgres.app. It’s written by the guys @ Heroku and is essentially a .app that you drop in your Applications folder. Run whenever you want a PG server — it’s THAT easy.

Well… Sorta…

After installing it I had some issues but was able to figure it out so that’s really the “gotcha” part of this post.

On first launch i realized i couldn’t connect to the PG server and immediately went to my system’s console for clues. This was sitting there looking pretty: